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We seem to be left with only one conclusion—that the national 
oborona task somehow comprehends Soviet naval operations against 
the shore. We feel this to be the case, for one thing, because the 
navy’s main task was designated as national oborona in the Gorshkov 
series and as operations against the shore here, and clearly there 
is no implication of a downgrading of national oborona, since he 
speaks above of its ‘““even more important significance.” For another 
thing, he addresses first the ‘“‘two tasks’? of operations against the 
shore and combating the enemy fleet, then the two tasks of national 
oborona and combating the enemy fleet—and even refers to the latter 
set as ‘‘both these tasks.’”’ In other words, national oborona does 
not appear to constitute an additional, third task. 
We have progressed perhaps but, even with this firmer footing, 
are we not worse off than before? For however much national oborona 
involves operations against the shore, it is still a ‘defense’ task, 
defense against attacks from the sea. It would be tempting to evade 
our very real dilemma by the hypothesis that operations against the 
shore might include attacks against enemy naval bases, from which 
ships can sally forth to attack the U.S.S.R. from the sea, but this 
would be wrong since, as we have already shown, operations against 
the enemy fleet include attacks against vessels in their bases as well 
as at sea. In other words, operations against targets on land involve 
deep strikes, strikes of general-state significance, rather than of specifi- 
cally naval significance. But this is absurd, for there is not a single 
such nonnaval target on land that I can think of which, if not inter- 
dicted, could mount an attack on the U.S.S.R. from the sea—and 
there can be no question of an error in expression here, since Gorsh- 
kov tells us repeatedly, both in the series and in his Navy Day article 
above, that it is only attacks from the sea that concern him, attacks 
specifically by the SSBNs which have appeared in a “series of navies.” 
Moreover, in the many Soviet discussions of damage-linking strategic 
strikes that I have collected, all such strikes are treated as serving 
the cause of national zashchita rather than national oborona. 
Wriggle as we will, we are back again to deterrence as the content 
of the national oborona task, for it is only as an instrument of deter- 
rence that operations against the shore—or, rather, the capacity and 
the readiness to conduct such operations—can protect one against 
attacks from the sea. But we already knew from the Gorshkov series 
that national oborona at least included deterrence (i.e., the entire 
panoply of military-diplomatic measures—deterrence proper, offsetting 
and applying military-political pressure, negotiating from a position 
of strength, enhancing the U.S.S.R.’s military-political prestige, etc.). 
There is, however, this difference: whereas in the series the context 
was always peacetime deterrence whenever Gorshkov directly ad- 
dressed the national oborona task, the passage above has a wartime 
flavor, since the only ‘‘other task” that ‘“‘remains,’’ along with that 
of national oborona, is the mission of ‘“‘combating the enemy fleet,” 
which is clearly a military-strategic assignment within the system of 
the armed forces and if there were another assignment of significant 
scale within that system he should have mentioned it. In other words, 
‘national oborona against an attack from the sea” amounts to the 
